The Night Bazaar
The Night Bazaar Fargo's mobile underground market. *'Location: '''Varies wildly throughout Region 3 of the Zone . *'Leadership: '''I'm not yet certain, but as far as I can tell its organized by a combination of Prairie Public activists, hippie Biodynamic farmers, local Craftpunks , Moorlocks , Roamer families, the SOMA gang, and other assorted radicals and desperates. Also, given that they almost never seem to get busted by BlockSec, its a dead cert that someone inside the Underbergs or the Group must be giving them cover, although who that is has eluded me so far. So, like a lot of these mid-sized company towns, legitimate commerce is limited to Corporate-Court-registered business entities. Now to the criminal element , like us, this doesn't make a lot of difference, drek, the stuff we do business in we aren't allowed to get licenses for anyway. But among the non-shadows folk, the small timers, the average citizens, this does keep a lot of smaller businesses, those who can't pay the registration fees to form legit corporations, from doing business openly. Still, business is business and where people can't do business openly, they'll do it clandestinely. Again, we work the shadows, we get that. And around this area a lot of those smaller groups are farmers and artisans. The rise of the Group and the influence of the Megas and Corporate Court was the death of the truck farmer and the legitimate Farmer's Market. But people kept growing and making things and other people wanted to buy them, and not just at the official businesses' inflated prices, especially as the power of labor waned and average people started making less and less. Now you'd think, with the "free market" line that the Corps are always spouting, they'd realize that where there's a need, somebody is going to step in to fill it. And that somebody is the Night Bazaar. Or rather, to be more accurate, that somebody is AT the Night Bazaar. A collection of local farmers and craftspeople, some who can't pay the fees and compete with Big Business, a few who won't, its times and places are known to the various informal local support networks, spread by word of mouth, almost never on the Matrix, or through channels that aren't closely monitored by the Powers That Be (ie the Khistova Server #sidechat), and is guarded against the Military-Industrial-Criminal-Enterainment Complex (or MICE as the anti-corp rads insist on calling it) by a patchwork of gangs and militias, including the PPU, SOMA, some Craftpunk militias and others. Its a place where you can sell almost anything, goods, service, experiance or knowlege, buy nearly anything, or engage in barter, swaps, sharing and the other means that the losers of the Great Game of Corporate Capitalism use to survive in a world where they shouldn't. Still, even with the precautions they take, this should have been stepped on long ago and the fact that it hasn't is the mystery I haven't quite cracked. Maybe the Powers That Be realize that the people need a safety valve to compensate for the inadequacies in the current system or maybe somebody higher up is looking out for it. Or maybe there's some other answer I haven't yet found... Return to: Underworld Category:Underworld Category:Business Category:Politics